Recently, a team for the CableHome Initiative has been working to adopt a CableHome (CH) specification. This effort is being developed by industry leaders at the direction of the Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs) for the benefit of the consumer and these industries. The CableHome initiative and specification provides a universal home network for data communications (traffic) between consumer electronic devices in and around the home and to a Wide Area Network (WAN) such as the Internet supplied by a cable provider. A CH compliant device on this home network will make its Quality of Service (QoS) needs known to the Subnet Bandwidth Manager (SBM) and any other SBMs in the path between itself and a peer device on the home network. These QoS needs are obtained and reserved for the CH compliant device using a level 3 protocol, such as the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP). The device will then follow the directives of the SBM for use of the reserved bandwidth at layer 2.
One of the problems for the QoS team to solve, is how non-CH compliant devices may be accommodated in this CH environment. Non-CH compliant devices will not follow the directives of the SBM, which acts as an arbiter for the fair distribution of bandwidth in a particular Local Area Network (LAN) segment of the home network. These non-CH compliant devices will often transmit without regard to other devices, causing data packet collisions and general degradation of the overall quality of the system. Conversely, during reception, these devices are handicapped to make any type of request, and are therefore subject to the use and abuse of those devices that can request bandwidth in an organized manner. In this regard, these non-CH compliant devices may also be considered non-QoS capable devices.
Thus, the non-CH compliant devices may be incapable of making known to the other devices in the network its QoS needs and to follow the lead of the SBM in the LAN it is connected to. Therefore, if the non-CH device has a passive role in the exchange of information, it may not be able to get the bandwidth needed from the network. Further, if the non-CH device takes an active transmitter role, the CH system may be adversely affected by the non-CH device.
Although the CH compliant home LAN devices are smarter to implement a protocol for communicating the QoS needs of the device, there is also a cost for the development of the application to add this capability to present non-CH compliant home LAN devices. Thus, it is also desirable to utilize current non-CH compliant devices in a CH compliant home network.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system to provide QoS capability to non-CH devices and other such non-QoS capable home LAN devices in a home network, without the additional development costs or added component costs for converting a non-CH device to a CH compliant device.